Making art in the studio, listening to music or NPR and thinking, all the time thinking. It could be about red versus orange or politics or the world collapsing around us or growing old or (most probably) wondering what to have for dinner.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

OK, enough with the shoes and the aging mother, let's get back to Art.

So, here are five works in a series I'm calling Iconic Books. These are constructed pieces with encaustic and mixed media on wooden panels. The top panels look like open books (with some exaggerations) but have no text. The bottom panels are continuations or extensions of the visual ideas used in the top panels. (You may recognize some panels that I had in different configurations.)

These are all 21"H x 12"W x 1.5"D, on two joined wooden panels with black rubber strips and tacks on the sides instead of frames.

Tale of Shadows

Phantom Story

Redacted

Primal Memory

Bound Up

I began this work thinking about the way memory loss takes away content and eventually even removes form, but then I realized that books themselves are becoming artifacts and iconic forms as digital media takes over content. No matter how much easier it is to read on Kindle, nothing will take the place of a real book in the hand - the smell, the feel, all the surfaces of the cover to be explored, and the physical interaction with the pages. This physicality of the book as object can't be duplicated electronically. We're talking dimensionality here, not pixels.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

I couldn't resist posting these beyond belief images of shoes from a blog article in today's NY Times. A few weeks ago, when I saw some Bill Cunningham photos of actual women wearing heel-less shoes on the street, I thought that was the ultimate limit, but today's photos prove me wrong. Fashion-smashion.

Remind you of someone?

The NY Times article has some interesting excerpts from various writers, historians and shoe experts who comment on women's shoes, damage done to women's bodies by shoes (bunions and tendonitis anyone?) and why women's feet seem to be the locus of so much focus. Talk about yer foot fetish!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Finally the long struggle to cope with my mother's declining ability to care for herself has come to some resolution. This past Monday we moved my mother to a nursing home in Amherst, about a half-hour drive from where we live. All told, it took six or eight months to get the move accomplished. First, and still continuing, the struggle was with my mother, who failed to see the necessity of a move to a nursing home. Secondly, I worked very hard, and seemingly without progress, to find a home that I liked and to comply with all the paperwork required.

Eleanor's new home.

So this is not to say that I am now without stress over my mother's condition, but I hope that the stress eating diminishes somewhat since she's now in a safe place, and I can lose the 30 or so pounds I gained during the lead-up period. There's nothing like soothing yourself with comfort foods except they do not go down without a trace - unfortunately.

All I have left to do (hah!) is to go to the apartment she's lived in for the past 31 years and clean it out. No problem!

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What am I reading?

I'm always reading something and now it's another one of Robert Caro's volumes of Lyndon Johnson's biography. "Passage of Power" is the fourth volume in this monumental series and covers the years 1958 to 1964. This period of Johnson's life was full of extremes of power - from the peak as Majority Leader of the Senate, then fading as he failed to actively campaign for the presidential nomination in 1960. Once he joined Kennedy on the 1960 Democratic ticket, his southern connections gave Kennedy the win, but Johnson sank into powerless oblivion and became the butt of jokes by "the Harvards." On Kennedy's death, Johnson ascended to the presidency and experienced another series of extremes of political power.

Caro is a master of biography and is always interesting and informative. I recommend this volume (and series) to anyone who follows politics and wants to know some background on how we got where we are today.